Online social networks are well known, and examples include LinkedIn®, Google+®, Facebook®, and various additional online social utilities that support social networking. Such social networks can grow as their members discover and connect with other people who have similar interests or experiences.
Social networks track and enable connections between their members (including people, businesses, and other entities). In particular, social networking websites allow their members to efficiently communicate information that is relevant to friends or other connections on the social network. Social networks typically incorporate a system for maintaining connections among members in the social network and for maintaining links to content that is likely to be relevant to the members. Social networks also connect and maintain information about their members. This information may be substantially static, such as employer, job type, age, music preferences, interests, and a variety of other attributes, or it may be more dynamic, such as a member's geographic location within a city, or his or her actions within the social network.
A typical modern computer-implemented social networking application allows each member to provide some biographical and contact information, to identify his or her interests, and to make social networking posts about his or her status and daily life. Social networks can also suggest to the member other members whom the user might know, or other members with compatible interests. Some social networks allow users to define relationships between the user and their connections. For example, a user may designate another contact as their brother, friend, or co-worker. While these defined relationships exist within the social network, the information is not currently used by outside applications.
Typically, when a member of a social network wishes to share information with other members of the social network, the member uploads or copies and pastes the information to a location on the social network as a social networking post, or sends the information in the form of a private message or email to other members.
An ontology formally represents knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain, and the relationships between pairs of concepts. An ontology provides a shared vocabulary, which can be used to model a domain, that is, the type of objects and/or concepts that exist, and their properties and relations. Ontologies create a structural framework for organizing information and are used in artificial intelligence, the semantic web, and other areas as a form of knowledge representation about the world or some part of it.
The semantic web is a standard that promotes common data formats on the internet. The semantic web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundary. The semantic web involves publishing in languages specifically designed for data: Resource Description Framework (RDF, Web Ontology Language (OWL), and Extensible Markup Language (XML). HTML describes documents and the links between them. RDF, OWL, and XML, by contrast, can describe arbitrary things such as people, meetings, or parts of an object or assembly. Machine-readable descriptions enable content managers to add meaning to content, i.e., to describe the structure of the knowledge we have about content. In this way, a machine can process knowledge itself, instead of text, using processes similar to human deductive reasoning and inference, thereby obtaining more meaningful results and helping computers to perform automated information gathering and research.